ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER

Abelman, Frayne, &Schwab

On March 14, 1899, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was issued U.S. Patent No. 621,195 for his invention entitled, "Navigable Balloon." The rigid airship, ultimately became commonly known as the "Zeppelin."

Von Zeppelin was the scion of a noble family dating back to the year 1400 in Mecklenburg - Pomeranian. Zepelin, the eponymous hometown of the family, is a small community outside the town of Bützow. He had an extended military career serving as a volunteer in the Union army during the American Civil War and in the Austrian war of 1866 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 before turning his attention to the creation of air ships to use for military purposes.

The overall cylindrical shape with rounded ends was covered with a cotton shell, framed with aluminum struts, wire-braced and contained a number of independent hydrogen balloons used for lift (due to the highly flammable nature of hydrogen gas, helium ultimately came to prominence as the gas of choice). Two or more separate engines were suspended below for propulsion. Von Zeppelin had previously patented his air ship in Germany on August 31, 1895, which was entitled, "Lenkbarer Luftfahrzug" (meaning "steerable air-cruising train"), and referred to a feature whereby additional cylindrical mid-segments could be connected together for a longer airship with greater carrying capacity, though none were ever made in this form.

A von Zeppelin Air Ship circa 1900

The German airships were used with moderate success during World War I to complete bombing raids in France and England. However, their effectiveness was often curtailed by winds, weather and ultimately the improvement of anti-aircraft weaponry as the War progressed. The defeat of Germany in 1918 halted the airship business temporarily. But under the guidance of Hugo Eckener, the deceased Count's successor, civilian zeppelins became popular in the 1920s. Their heyday was during the 1930s when the airships LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin and LZ 129 Hindenburg operated regular transatlantic flights from Germany to North America and Brazil. The Art Deco spire of the Empire State Building was originally if impractically designed to serve as a dirigible terminal for Zeppelins and other airships to dock.

The Hindenburg disaster in 1937 in which the airship (having been filled with hydrogen instead of helium because of a shortage of the later due to military embargo in Germany at the time) exploded in a tremendous fireball in Lakehurst, New Jersey, along with political and economic issues of the time, hastened the demise of the Zeppelin.